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Music Memories + Songs

Thursday, April 14, 2005

5 years of super-compressed history

They had the rare ability to be just what
we needed, when we needed it.

They kept evolving to what we wanted to be,
to make the music we wanted to hear, 6
months to a year before we could possibly
have known it.

Long hair, drugs, peace and love -- it's
difficult to imagine the 60s without
The Beatles. They took us from the fun
loving and simple early 60s to the wilder
mod 60s to the radical hippy late 60s.

Always one step ahead of us, but always
leading us toward where we wanted to be.

Looking back, what they did on this level
is a miracle, considering the fast rate of
change of the times. We went from a time
-- early in 1964 -- that was essentially
the 1950s. To the extreme social upheaval
of 1969-1971.

A Rip van Winkle who fell asleep in January
1964 and woke up again in 1969 could
easily have thought they had slept for 100
years instead of 5 -- or that long-haired
alien invaders had taken over the planet.

The social -- and musical changes -- were
that vast.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more
I think you could make a case that all the
ups and downs and changes from 1969 to now
have their roots in those 5 years. Even
the economic differences between now and
then were foreshadowed by the go-go years
on Wall Street and the crash that started
around 1969.

The protests set the stage for Watergate and
our eventual military withdrawal from Vietnam,
including abandoning the Shah of Iran to
Muslim fanatics and all the fuels the terrorism
we face. The political lines we have today
have been changed and redefined, but still
primarily in terms of what happened in those
5 years -- from Women's Liberation to the
Stonewall riots that set the stage for Gay
Rights, from the Civil Rights Act of 1964
passed by the Civil Rights movement to
Black Power to the first affirmative action
that began around 1969. From drugs as something
done only by ghetto inhabitants or beatniks
to the use of psychedelics and coke and even
heroin by white upper and middle class kids.

Sounds like a book I ought to write someday.

Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

Her and Bobby McGee

The "60s" were a time of great changes, and
great changes within the great changes. Certainly what
is meant by the "60s" when referring to the Mod
era about 1966 is a lot different than the full blown
hippie era of 1969 or the radicals or the Black Power etc.

If I had to pick one song that most exemplied the
spirit of how many of my generation actually lived
in those times, it'd be "Me and Bobby McGee" as sung
by Janis Joplin.

(Forget Kris Kristofferson. Why would a man even
sing a woman's song?)

I don't mean it's the best example of 60s MUSIC -
that's not true at all. It's musically a very simple
song and the 60s produced some wonderful music. And
that song wouldn't be anything close to the music
produced by the later Beatles, Pink Floyd,
Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Mothers of Invention,
Doors, etc.

But in representing how many people actually LIVED -
I can't think of a better song than this slice of life
story of two young kids hitchhiking across the country,
for probably no better reason than it was there and they
were in love.

(You younguns may be surprised to learn that
hitchhiking was not so uncommon then. I did it as
a kid in high school, just hitching around my home
town. When I had a car I picked hitchhikers up.

Now I would not do either one unless desperate. It
was dangerous then -- my uncle's father-in-law had
already died of a heart attack when robbed by
a hitchhiker he picked up -- but the threat just
didn't seem that bad, partly because lots of us
did it.

Now I wouldn't dare unless my car broke down too far
to walk someplace. And I wouldn't pick somebody else
unless that seemed to be their situation, AND they
really looked harmless. The presence of a woman
would help, although I realize it's naive to think
a woman would not accompany or even participate with
a killer or robber.)

Feeling as faded as their jeans, from no food,
rough sleep and lots of drugs . . . two young hippies
are picked up by a truckdriver, which happened a lot
despite all the class and generational conflicts
of the time and EASY RIDER.

And they sing together all the way to New Orleans.

The stark viewpoint that "Freedom's just another word
for nothing left to lose," is one of those things
that nobody quite put into those words before but
it seems obvious when you do say it.

And prepares us for the end when the girl finds
-- too late -- she did have something else to
lose . . . Bobby McGee himself -- and now
she'd trade all the rest of her life to
be holding his body next to hers . . .

but . . . it's too late.

We must lose what we didn't appreciate, to grow
up. Mourn it, and then grow up some more, by
learning to move on and find something else to
appreciate -- although never enough.

And unfortunately Janis Joplin didn't have time
left to move on. She lost the one thing that
cannot be replaced -- her life.

How to fly for free